


i'll never be able to shake you

by Granspn



Series: slide on the ice [1]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Post-Canon, as well as a made up californian, as well as some made up residents of crabbaple cove, i'll tag more ppl and stuff as they appear, sidney makes a brief cameo, waggles is there :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:35:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25835839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Granspn/pseuds/Granspn
Summary: because everyone needs their theory of what happened after the war, the when why and how of bj and hawk reconciling their love for each other with their hatred of where and how and why they met, starting with Hawkeye getting home and going from there"A postcard caught his eye. There was no message on it, just his name and address printed neatly in black ink in handwriting that was almost familiar. His name, making this the first piece of mail he’d gotten since he’d been home. His name 'Hawkeye' meaning it was from someone who actually knew him. A San Fransisco postmark, meaning all of a sudden he realized where he knew the handwriting from. It wasn’t BJ’s writing; it was the writing on all of his letters."
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt/Peg Hunnicutt
Series: slide on the ice [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1874662
Comments: 13
Kudos: 82





	1. slide on the ice

**Author's Note:**

> so this started bc I wanted to write a reunion fic a few years down the line where Margaret and Hawkeye run into each other and things go from there bc their friendship is very dear to me, but I was having trouble convincing myself of what would have happened in the interim, which turned into needing to come up w my theory of what happened btwn Hawkeye and bj after they got home and now we’re however many thousand words deep and part two w Margaret is coming as soon as well. also i have been working on this for so long already and i was waiting until the whole thing was done to post it but i feel like i just have to get something out there before my brain explodes

Having a kid had seemed like the perfect decision. Hannah Pierce had gotten pregnant just after the armistice, what could they say? Peace made them both hot. Ten years later she was dead and he and Hawkeye were on their own. Then Wall Street crashed and his kid spent his formative years in a depression. In The Depression. Ten years later and Germany invades Poland and it’s another World War.

“Whatever happened to the war to end all wars?” Hawkeye asked him on the drive back to school after a break.

“Never believe anything the army tells you,” Daniel said. “The army and the government want one thing,” he said sadly, “Profit. If you’re after anything else, you’re on your own.”

Ten years later and the U.N. is sending people into Korea for reasons which to Daniel are wholly indiscernible. They’re sending young American kids to die in another war which kills him in more ways than he can count, but at least Ben is safe from it all. At least the army doesn’t want thirty year old guys, thirty year old guys with posture that could give you a back ache from fifty paces and a mouth that can run the mile faster than their legs. He knows just knowing there’s a war like that, each more senseless than the last, will torture his son, but at least it will be from twelve thousand miles away.

A few weeks later and he reads in the paper that Truman has signed something called the “Doctors Draft Act,” and his entire circulatory system is on fire. A few weeks later he gets a phone call from Boston.

“Hey, Dad. It’s me.”

“Hawk. Everything okay?”

“I, uh, I think I might need you to send me down a new scarf or something.”

“Hm?”

“I seem to have gotten caught in the draft.” 

Three years later and he was home, and he was the same, but different.

Daniel always said that Hawkeye had funny bones. He was doomed to it, he had no choice, even his name was a joke. Benjamin Franklin Pierce, that is, the founding father and the president, not to mention the very height of irony, the nickname out of a war novel. It was the first thing anybody trying to describe him would say. _Oh, Hawkeye? Yeah, he’s really funny. Great surgeon. Bad attitude_. The jokes saved his life in Korea, maybe saved a few others, too. People always said they’d go crazy if he wasn’t there making everybody laugh.

When he got home, he couldn’t joke. It was like suffocating, feeling himself forget how to be funny. His dad noticed quickly how unusual it was for his son to just watch the world go by without comment. All those years of being told not to talk back and that nobody likes a smart-aleck all seemed to hit at once. It couldn’t be that the army had got to him; he’d been hearing about shenanigans, goofs, and practical jokes right to the hilt, in letters that arrived even after Hawkeye was back home. He’d even feed him set-ups just to watch him respond in sincerity and cringe at not having the energy to be his old self.

“Dad, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said one afternoon over cups of coffee. “I feel like my head is gonna explode.”

“Don’t know what to do without a captive audience?” Daniel floated. Hawkeye quirked an eyebrow.

“Interesting theory. Depressing as hell.”

“Want to try to call BJ again?”

Hawkeye shook his head. “Everything makes me feel crazy. Him especially.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to see patients. I want to sleep. Sometimes I feel like I could do both at the same time.”

“Maybe you could, but not if they’re my patients.”

Hawkeye huffed in an approximation of a small laugh.

“Why don’t you lie down? Take a nap, or read something,” Daniel suggested. “I’ll be in my office.” Hawkeye just nodded, and stayed sitting silently in the kitchen for fifteen minutes after his dad had gone. He sat how he always sat, with one foot perched up on the chair with him, his knee creating an impromptu armrest as he watched his coffee go cold. He didn’t want to go back to his room, his childhood bedroom, because it, like all things, made him crazy. And he could lie down, but he couldn’t sleep.

Another week went by like that, and Hawkeye found himself walking back to the house with an armful of groceries. He grabbed the mail on his way in and dumped it absently on the dining room table and almost left it there, but a postcard caught his eye. There was no message on it, just his name and address printed neatly in black ink in handwriting that was almost familiar. _His_ name, making this the first piece of mail he’d gotten since he’d been home. His name _Hawkeye_ meaning it was from someone who actually knew him. A San Fransisco postmark, meaning all of a sudden he realized where he knew the handwriting from. It wasn’t BJ’s writing; it was the writing on all of his letters.

He flipped it over and saw that it wasn’t really a postcard at all, just a polaroid photograph. A polaroid photograph that must have been taken from BJ’s roof, of his backyard, of all the stones from his garden laid out in a giant pattern in the grass, spelling the word “HELLO.” From inside the “O,” Peggy and Erin stood smiling and waving up at the photographer.

 _What it says on the tin_ , read the caption in a horrible doctor’s scrawl, and it was all Hawkeye could do not to kiss the paper or swallow the photo whole.

“Dad!” Hawkeye called to the house at large, “I have to make a phone call!”

After that, BJ and Hawkeye talked on the phone almost every day. Daniel could hear them in the other room, not clearly enough to make out what they were saying but enough to know that some days they cried, but most days they laughed like crazy, and it was a sound like no other he’d heard before. It was almost as good as the first time he’d ever made Ben laugh playing peek-a-boo and known even then that his laughter was infectious, loud and manic and perfect and the only sound he ever wanted to hear. Hearing him laugh on the phone with BJ was better than music, better than anything, because it meant he was getting better. _Laughter is the best medicine_ , Daniel restrained himself from saying out loud since even the thought of it made him groan, but there was truth to its triteness, he was finding, and of course it was a mantra he and Hawkeye had found themselves living by for a long time whether they liked it or not. 

After a few more weeks, and on the recommendation of a psychiatrist friend in Bangor, Daniel started urging Hawkeye to reintegrate into society more.

“Is that a technical term, Dad? You sound like you’ve been reading the DSM. Or eating it.”

“I just think you should try and go into town more! Maybe hook up with some of your old friends, grab a drink. Go to the soda fountain.”

“Have a really hip nineteen-thirty-seven.”

“Right,” Daniel said, meeting his son’s icy stare with one of his own. It was getting to the point where if Hawkeye was gonna dish it, he was gonna have to take it, too.

So Hawkeye found himself at the diner with a handful of school friends who still lived in the area, eating a plate of French fries for dinner and just managing to stop himself from sniffing each one before he ate it. It hadn’t been as daunting as he’d imagined, getting everyone back together. Some of the guys had been in the war, too, of course, one an engineer who’d been drafted, and another guy who’d volunteered for the infantry. Just like Tommy, Hawkeye thought, except this joker made it back alive and Tommy who’d known the war was shit and just wanted to prove it to everyone back home never got the chance. Neither of them had seen a MASH, though, and the fact that some of his stories seemed to freak out the infantryman sort of freaked him out, too. Some people were mysteriously missing from the group, too, and Hawkeye asked after them.

“Whatever happened to Harry Feld? He was always a good kid.”

“Oh, you didn’t hear?”

“Shit. He didn’t get killed over there, did he?”

“No. He, uh, he was running a communist group in Burlington.”

“Of course,” Hawkeye laughed.

“He got caught. Arrested. He’s still in jail.” Go figure.

And they all seemed to be married, the ones that were left, anyway. Some to each other, like the engineer to the town librarian, and the grocer’s daughter to a kid who grew up to be a firefighter, and some to people they’d left at home to watch the kids. The infantryman had a son Erin Hunnicutt’s age. Hawkeye was alone in being alone.

“Didn’t meet a nice girl out there, Hawk? Some nurse to make an honest woman out of?”

“Oh, I met plenty of nice girls out there. Plenty of nice boys, too, but nobody was husband material,” he quipped. At least he could quip. It was a lie, of course. The parts of BJ that weren’t made of feet or mustache were made of husband material, but he wasn’t really sure how to explain him to his white picket fence high school friends without causing an epidemic fainting spell.

And when they went to the bar afterwards and he ordered a dry martini out of habit he didn’t know how to explain when the sight of it made him start retching his dinner up so quickly he barely made it to the bathroom. He sat on the cold tile floor and rested his head against the door of a stall and cried for ten minutes, muffling the sobs in his elbow. He did not know how to explain that.

“Okay, gang, I think that’s it for me,” He said after splashing some cold water on his face and plastering on a smile. “Must’ve been something I ate.”

“Sure, Hawkeye. You okay getting home?” The firefighter asked.

“Sure, sure, I’m fine. Hey, it was great to see everybody again, glad you’re all doing so well and well-adjusted. Why don’t we do this again sometime after the next war, okay? Bye now!” And they stared at him as he left but nobody followed him out. Nobody even moved to stop him. When he went home he called BJ.

“Yello,” came the answer.

“Beej, it’s me. I just tried to drink a martini.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

“I threw up for ten minutes, cried for ten minutes, and drove home. Add that to the list.”

“Right.”

Hawkeye and BJ were compiling a list of all the things that used to be normal that now made them sick. So far it included the color green, jeeps, Chuck Taylors, chickens, babies, sushi, helicopters, “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” rubber gloves, bathrobes, teddy bears, salami, and poker chips. And martinis. There weren’t any Korean restaurants in Crabapple Cove as far as Hawkeye knew but he figured with reluctance that if there were any that he’d be adding kimchi to that list. Even the sight of relatively healthy young men made them nervous, since all they could do was picture what they’d look like with a great big hole in the middle, stuffed full of shrapnel and mortar fragments. Hawkeye had the idea of one day calling up Sidney Freedman and reading him the list, and asking if it was worth it to just stay inside forever to avoid seeing any of that stuff, or if instead maybe he could help him readjust. He figured it wasn’t crucial that he go back to drinking martinis, but just that it would be swell not to need to vomit every time he saw someone in a green shirt and basketball shoes.

After a few more weeks, Hawkeye had been home for three months.

“This is starting to feel a little ridiculous, you know,” he told his dad from his perch in the living room armchair. His whole life he’d seemed incapable of just sitting in a chair. He always needed his legs and arms all akimbo up on it, which is of course how he was splayed currently, in the chair in which he’d had the most practice.

“You’re telling me,” Daniel said, “You’re practically upside down.”

“I mean being here. In this house. I mean, I’m thirty-five years old and I live with my dad. I used to have an apartment, you know. With a girl. With green walls. I know you think I’m crazy now but sheesh! What was I like back then!”

“Would you feel less ridiculous if you saw some patients? No surgery, nothing intense, just consultations, check-ups, that sort of thing.”

 _Yeah, no surgery because the sight of a scalpel sends you into a cold sweat_ , Hawkeye thought. But Sidney always said the most important thing for the boys having the worst trauma response was to get them back into a foxhole as soon as possible. He thought by now he’d spent enough time this far behind the front lines.

“Okay, yeah. I think I’d like that. I’d like to try, anyway.”

And so after another week he was seeing patients in his dad’s office. Nobody seemed to mind being saddled with Dr. Pierce the younger, in fact, some of them seemed to know about his hotshot reputation at the 4077th; how, he couldn’t possibly imagine. Everybody else just knew he was Hawkeye, and trusted him implicitly based on that. He wondered what they would have printed on his office if he’d ever gotten his own at the hospital back in Boston. If he could have convinced them to print “Hawkeye Pierce, M.D.” in gold leaf on oak, since what was that if not his name.

Seeing patients was okay. He’d been right, it was nice to actually get to know people while you treated them instead treating them like machines on an assembly line. He even managed to hold it together while he vaccinated Mrs. Amberson’s six month old, though the second they left he collapsed on his own examination table, cried for ten minutes, then found himself swimming in so much sweat he had to go back to the house and change his shirt before he could see his next patient.

After a few more weeks, his fingers started to itch, started to twitch, started to crave cool metal and beating hearts. The thought of surgery didn’t nauseate him; it exhilarated him. It felt almost like it used to. When he got home he called BJ.

“BJ, I’m cured!”

“Like a ham. Of what?”

“I want to be a surgeon!”

“I have _great_ news for you.”

“No, Beej, I’m serious. Clamps, sutures, scalpels, I can imagine it all without my guts coming up! I can go back to work!”

“Hawk– Hawk– Hawkeye! Would you calm down? I thought you wanted to do the whole family practice thing. No more meatball surgery, remember?”

“Not all surgery is meatball surgery. I’m gonna work in a, uh, a stationary civilian all-purpose hospital. An S.C.A.P.H. A _scaph_. See? Consider it coined. Because I don’t just feel useless here, I am useless. I’m just seeing patients that my dad has the time to, anyway. He’s only letting me do it as a favor to _me_ , he doesn’t need me here. I need to be somewhere I can actually help people. Wasn’t that the point of the whole doctor thing? Ours is a humane profession? Beej? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, Hawk, I’m here, I’m here. I’m just thinking. Do you hear yourself? You haven’t had this much energy in months. I’m happy to see you ride the high but just… not to anywhere you can’t get home from, you know?”

Hawkeye took a deep breath. “Yeah, I know. I keep thinking about what Sidney said. I’m just trying to slide on the ice.”

“Then do me a favor, Hawk. Why don’t you call him? Even if he can’t talk to you he’ll know someone who can. I just don’t– I don’t want to see you get hurt. Again.”

“For you, Beej? Anything. I’ll call him as soon as we hang up. Actually it’s late here. I’ll call first thing in the morning. Because as you can see I’m a very considerate person. If I hadn’t been a doctor they were gonna hire me to usher funerals.”

“Sure thing, Hawk. Hey, but listen, I’m happy for you. And hearing you talk like that makes me excited. Like one day soon I might feel like that. I don’t want you to think I’m saying all this because I don’t want you to feel better, I really do. I’m just being cautious because…” BJ trailed off.

“It’s okay, Beej, I’m famously fragile. In fact, I’m cracked. I get it. Hey, Beej?”

“Yeah.”

“I love you.”

“Love you, too. Listen, I gotta go, Hawk, it’s dinner time. Tell your dad ‘hi’ from me, okay?”

“You got it. Talk to you soon.” 

So the next morning he left his name and number at Sidney’s office and waited for them to call him back with appointment times. He was about to try and find an old New York Yellow Pages to look for a hotel when the phone rang.

“Ol’ Doc Pierce and Son’s Traveling Medicine Show.”

“Hawkeye. It’s Sidney,” he said warmly from the other end of the line.

“Sidney, I didn’t mean for you to call. I was gonna come to New York, I–”

“Don’t worry about it. Call it a house call. On the house.”

Hawkeye smiled into the receiver. He told Sidney how he’d been feeling, and about his and BJ’s list, and about the things he was starting to be able to cross off it. He told him about feeling stagnant, and useless, and helpless, and about wanting to get back into the game the way Sidney always used to tell his patients was the only thing to do.

“You know what my prescription is?” Sidney said, after listening, and listening, and listening, “A trip to San Francisco to see your friend BJ. If you still feel up to it after a week of that, a week of such vivid reminders of the war, give me another call and we’ll talk about what kind of work you might like.”

Hawkeye was stunned. He didn’t know why, it’s not like he expected Sidney to tell him to stay put forever. He guessed he didn’t know what he expected. “You really think that’s such a good idea?” Hawkeye asked.

“Sure, don’t you? Even if it doesn’t, shall we say, advance your career, don’t you want to go and see BJ?”

“I mean, yeah, more than anything in the world I want to see BJ. But isn’t it important to move on?”

“Move on? From your trauma, sure! From the war, sure. But not from your friends, especially not one who was as important to you as BJ. I hope it’s not too presumptuous of me to say that BJ seems like the kind of guy you might have been friends with even if you’d met him out here in the real world. That’s reason enough to me that you should stay friends. You don’t have to act like you’re old war buddies. In fact, I think that would be a real step backwards. But you should go, if you want, and talk to him. Ask him how he’s doing, and see how you can help each other back into real life.”

“Well when you put it like that it sounds practically rational.”

“That’s why they pay me the big money.”

“Thanks, Sidney. You really are the best in the business.” He moved to hang up, but stopped himself, “Hey, Sidney. Next time I call, are you gonna bill me?”

“We’ll see, Hawkeye. We’ll see.”


	2. from hello to i love you because of the war

Hawkeye told his dad what Sidney had told him.

“That’s certainly an interesting idea,” Daniel said. “BJ might be the only person in the world who really understands how you feel. You know, you talk about him like you used to talk about Carlye. That constant amazement that someone could fit so well with you, like you’re a couple of puzzle pieces. Not to mention he’s the only thing about the war that doesn’t make you sick.”

“Dad, I–”

“And I bet BJ should see you just as much as you should see him. And I’ll only be a phone call away. If you get upset, if you need anything, just call me. Collect.” 

So he floated the idea to BJ, who said he had to float it to Peg, who floated it to a psychiatrist friend _she_ had in Santa Barbara who said if Hawkeye’s shrink said it was a good idea it was probably kosher. So in another week he found himself on a connecting flight to New York and then direct on to San Francisco and after six more hours he found himself in baggage claim looking into the eyes of the eminent BJ Hunnicutt. And Peg Hunnicutt, famed in song and story, and Erin Hunnicutt, famed in blurry old photograph and in graphite on paper.

BJ was clean shaven. They’d had to add mustaches to the list. And he looked… okay. As if he’d been holding up about the same as Hawkeye. Peggy looked tired, too, not like she had in that film from their anniversary, all primped and dolled and beautiful. She was still beautiful, but in person she looked more like a person, like the real mother of a real toddler, rather than the picturesque picture of a housewife Hawkeye had come to picture. Which actually made sense, considering all he’d heard about her. Fixing the rain gutter by herself, getting a job to pay the mortgage, being her own handyman and husband for two years, basically. She was a go-getter, a little hard-headed from BJ’s description, and by all accounts always ready to take matters into her own hands if no one else was gonna step up and do it. Maybe BJ had a type. He didn’t know what to do when he walked over to them.

“It’s really you,” Hawkeye breathed. A handshake would be beyond bizarre, but something in him stopped him from going in for the hug, like he didn’t think it was fair to Peggy. A ridiculous thought, as if Hawkeye were some “other woman” BJ had had around, like whatever they had in Korea wasn’t completely undefinable in terms used by the kinds of people who have two mortgages and a baby. And anyway, BJ hugged him.

Hawkeye decided he had been selfish for coming to San Francisco. He hadn’t thought about what it would be like for Peggy to see him, to make her agonize, wondering if there was going to be a change in BJ when he was around, wondering if really the war did change him and he was different now to when he left. And he didn’t think what it was going to be like for BJ to reconcile the two halves of himself, the half that spent the whole war back here in California and the half that was there, imagining a life back East where even if he wasn’t _with_ Hawkeye he could see him whenever he wanted to. Hawkeye wanted to believe that coming in person was a charitable act, a win-win situation but even as Erin Hunnicutt grabbed his nose and said “Hawk!” a little too loud for how close she was he felt so guilty he almost turned around and tried to get on the nearest plane facing east.

But BJ was looking at him the same as he always did, and kept looking at him as Peggy handed Erin to him so her hands would be free to shake Hawkeye’s and she told him with a level of sincerity he couldn’t quite determine that it was wonderful to finally meet him. No matter what else he looked like, he figured he looked tired, too. And he remembered with a jolt that two years ago at BJ’s party she’d met his father. Which meant _he’d_ met _her,_ too. Which meant he’d known what she was like when he’d said it would be a good idea to come to California. Which meant hopefully he was right.

Besides, thinking about Peggy was just to distract him from having to think about BJ. They’d probably talked on the phone a hundred times since getting back to the states, but talking to him in person was a whole other ball game. Sure, sometimes on the phone he’d start crying, or hear BJ start, but that was only when they talked about things that were supposed to make you cry. About Henry. About Father Mulcahy. About Radar and Margaret and Klinger and Soon Li and worrying if they were all okay. And sometimes they'd laugh so hard Hawkeye thought he was going to cry or throw up, but that was only when they told stories from before, or reminisced about the few golden moments salvageable from the wreckage of all their horrible memories. But when they talked about real life, that is, life after the war, things were so matter of fact. Staring BJ in the face in the middle of the airport, nothing felt matter-of-fact to Hawkeye. They’d said “I love you” on the phone more times than Hawkeye could count, because it was simply true. He couldn’t recall a single time they’d said it in person. He felt like the world was melting around him and with it his brain.

“Come on, let’s get you home,” BJ said, his expression having shifting warily. “When was the last time you ate? Or slept?”

“Ate? I couldn’t eat. I think I had breakfast yesterday. Slept? 1949.”

“Sounds about right,” BJ said, as he led their little troop out to where they’d parked their car.

Hawkeye foresaw a little bit of office politics as they walked through the parking lot. Obviously, Peggy always sat up front in the passenger seat. But wouldn’t it be odd to sit Hawkeye in the back with Erin? Would it be worse to sit Hawkeye in the front with BJ? If Peg sat up front with Erin in her lap, would it be obvious that it was just to avoid sitting Hawkeye and BJ together? Hawkeye hovered by the passenger side back door.

“I’ll drive,” Peggy said, holding out her hand for BJ to toss her the keys. “Hawkeye, why don’t you sit up front with me, so BJ can watch Erin.” It was phrased like a question, but of course it was an instruction. Hawkeye obliged, curious. He watched BJ buckle Erin into her carseat. Whatever BJ said, her shoes still looked tiny to Hawkeye. He tried to catch BJ’s gaze as he sprawled himself across the rest of the backseat looking almost comically tall, but his eyes were fixed on the back of Peggy’s headrest. Hawkeye twisted back around and watched the road as they careened down the highway in silence that was either familial or awkward, he couldn’t tell.

“You look just like your dad,” Peggy said, “But your mom must have had blue eyes.”

“Peggy, I…” Hawkeye started, but trailed off, alarmed by Peg regarding him as best she could with her eyes still on the road.

“Yours are blue and dark at the same time,” she said. She rendered him speechless in a way BJ never did.

BJ was being fucking quiet, too. He only ever clammed up like this when something was really bothering him, like when that journalist, Aggie, had come to camp and he’d fallen promptly in love with her and just as promptly began the self-flagellation.

They pulled up in front of a house that could have come straight out of a catalog. You never would have guessed that Peggy had spent the last two years being her own handyman, although allegedly BJ had taken up pruning the lemon tree now that he was back. The whole scene was as close to the white picket fence American dream as you could get without actually having a white picket fence. It briefly crossed Hawkeye’s mind to wonder why he never seemed to crave that specific picture of domesticity, but he had more pressing matters for the meantime. He tried to corner BJ without looking like he was trying to corner him. He got him just after he handed Erin off to Peg.

“I thought you wanted me to come,” Hawkeye said, figuring that would be enough to open the floodgates, the effusive ‘I love yous’ and ‘oh my god of course I wanted you to come I’m just overwhelmed by my feelings’ but BJ stayed silent. At least he looked like he was trying to think of something to say. Eventually, of course, Hawkeye couldn’t take it anymore.

“Both of you, actually. The postcard? The phone calls?”

“Hawkeye, seeing you makes me feel crazy.”

“There’s worse things to be.”

“Hawk, I don’t know who we are or what we are. I feel like we met in a place out of time. I don’t know how long I’ve known you. I don’t know how long it feels like. What do you do when you would give anything not to have met your best friend, since the place you met was so fucked up it almost wasn’t worth it?” Hawkeye’s eyes grew wide and BJ took him by the arm and led him up the porch steps, and they hovered by the wind chimes, stagnant in the rare humid day.

“I miss you so much, Hawkeye,” he said, “I think about you every day. I think about you as much as I used to think about Peggy! But now that you’re here I don’t know what to do with myself.”

“Just be here, too, I think,” Hawkeye said. “I don’t think we met like normal people. I don’t think we acted like normal people when we were over there. And we didn’t get to say goodbye like normal people. But I wish so much that I could have known you in any other place, any other time. Because we might have really had something there, you know?”

“Fuck,” BJ said on an exhale, “I know.”

“Listen,” Hawkeye said, “You’re important to me, you stupid idiot. And I hope I’m not being too presumptuous when I say I’m kind of important to you. And you and Peggy are important to each other. Obviously. So me and her have at least one thing in common. There’s no reason we can’t just try and have a nice week and make friends.”

“Except that we met ‘cause of the war.”

Hawkeye blinked. “Right,” he said, though he wondered if he and BJ felt that way for different reasons. Of course, the war had been the worst time in both of their lives. Anything different would have been beyond tragic. But he knew that sometimes they had different hangups. While Hawkeye was busy fighting the war against the war, BJ was fighting the war against being away. Hawkeye was defined by his desperation for peace, BJ by his desperation for his family. And while he agreed that the war was absurd and senseless and horrific and unconscionable and while Hawkeye hated being so far from his dad he knew sometimes their reasons for being were a little more like ships in the night than he might have wanted to admit.

“You– You can’t just go from ‘hello’ to ‘I love you’ because of the war,” BJ said.

“What?”

“You really think we would’ve been friends if we’d met over here?”

“I– yeah, of course I do. You don’t?”

“How will we ever know?”

Hawkeye stared at BJ and breathed. How indeed. He knew he loved the BJ he knew. And he knew he’d loved him or at least that he could love him almost from the first moment he spoke. Which meant he loved or at least could have loved the BJ from before the war. And Hawkeye felt changed but the same. And he’d never had the energy for pretense, least of all in Korea. He was always just Hawkeye, who cracked jokes and mistrusted authority and did what he thought was right, screw the consequences. So if BJ had loved that version of him at all he loved all versions of him, because there only ever was one.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Hawkeye said, chancing his luck with a hint of a smile. BJ reciprocated, just as subtle but still, just as there.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess we will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: san francisco


	3. Frisco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, I’ve been to san fransisco twice, so I’ve tried to capture it to the best of my ability. and if you didn't know before, this chapter will show just how much my life experience is severely colored by the fact that im a new york jew. 
> 
> read on, macduff!

Inside, Peggy was fixing a pot of coffee while an excitable dog scurried around her legs. BJ retrieved a paper bag of bagels from the breadbox and started slicing. Erin was sitting on the counter, her little legs dangling over the side while she watched BJ.

“Not sure I trust a bagel from the West Coast,” Hawkeye said.

“You’re gonna have to,” Peggy said, “They’re all you’ve got.”

Hawkeye glanced up, trying to make eye contact with BJ, but deliberately or not he kept his gaze down on his breadknife. Peggy handed Hawkeye a cup of coffee with two sugars in it. He stared into it. BJ had remembered how he took his coffee. And told Peg. And she remembered.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said. God, he couldn’t even think of a joke. So he just answered.

“All of it good, I hope.”

“Finest kind,” she said, knocking the wind out of him completely. That meant that was really what BJ said about him. And that he told her things that he told him.

“Same goes for you,” he said. “I, um–”

“I think we should go into the city tomorrow,” Peggy said. “Would you like that?” She said, to Erin, tweaking her nose, then looking over her to Hawkeye.

“Into the city!” Erin said, “Frisco!”

Hawkeye barked a laugh and looked over to see BJ smiling, too. “Frisco,” Hawkeye repeated. “My thoughts exactly.”

“We’ll go to Angie’s,” Peggy said, “We can go to the bookstore. _And_ we can go to the aquarium,” she said, directing the last thought to Erin. “I’ll take her home and you two can go to the wharf. Can you two make your own way back, BJ?”

“For you? Anything,” he said to Peggy while he handed a toasted bagel to Hawkeye on a plate. So he talked to Peggy the way Hawkeye talked to him. And Hawkeye couldn’t even tell if it was on purpose or not. While he was distracted BJ handed him a container and he placed in on the counter next to him without thinking.

“It’s your smear,” BJ said. Hawkeye looked down to see real Philadelphia cream cheese.

“ _Schmear_ ,” he corrected. “Breaking out the good stuff?”

“For you?” BJ said, “Anything.”

Hawkeye looked over to Peg but now she wouldn’t meet his eyes. So he rolled his and spread his cream cheese walked to the other side of the counter, and hoisted himself on it to sit next to Erin. Just like at home, when he did that his feet almost touched the ground.

“Bagel!” She said, “Hawk!”

“If you think these are good you’re gonna have to try one in New York sometime.”

“New York City?” Erin said.

“That’s right,” Hawkeye said, handing her half his bagel. “The best bagel shop in New York is– are you sure you don’t want to write this down? Is H&H Bagels on 79th and Broadway, uh, northwest corner, toward the park. Go in, and you can put your hand on the glass and feel which batch is warm, and get half a dozen of those to take home. Their sourdough bagels are so good you don’t even need a _schmear_ to eat them with. I used to take bites out of one like it was an apple on the train uptown. Mm! Mamma Mia! C’est magnifique!”

Erin had started giggling while he talked, getting cream cheese all over her little face and in her hair. Peggy laughed when she saw and came over to clean her up.

“When did you live in New York?” Peggy said.

“In college,” Hawkeye answered, taking a large bite and talking as he chewed. “Did my undergrad and med school at Columbia. Stayed for a year and did my internship at Presbyterian, had this great little apartment in Harlem with my friends, this, uh, a couple of girls from Barnard, we were literally a five minute walk from the Apollo Theater. It was magic. The best music, the best bars, and the best food are all in New York.”

“Funny,” Peggy said evenly, “I almost went to Barnard.”

Hawkeye wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and watched her turn around and start brewing more coffee. So in another life he might have met her instead of BJ. 

As they ate and cleaned up and set up the guest bedroom and talked about his flight and how things were in San Francisco Hawkeye watched how BJ and Peg interacted. Apparently, this was what being madly in love looked like. It was understated, where Hawkeye imagined it would be wild, and quiet where he thought it would be loud. It was stored in glances and subtle expressions, small smiles and playful slaps. They were the perfect picture of domestic wedded bliss. It was nothing like he’d ever had with Carlye. That was always jumping up and down and running around the apartment, laughing themselves silly covered in paint and getting shushed by old ladies for being too loud at the library or on the bus or at the grocery store or wherever, and getting yelled at every day for being unprofessional in the O.R. when all they were doing was cracking a few jokes. So it was nothing like he’d ever had with Trap, or BJ, either, since whatever they’d had was altogether more like what he’d had with Carlye than whatever BJ was having right now.

BJ was always the quiet one. Scheming behind the scenes rather than announcing his intentions to cause trouble at all times which was of course undoubtably Hawkeye’s M.O.. Still, when it came down to it BJ was just as childish as he was, as prone to laughing fits and comedy routines and occasional dramatics as the next guy, if the next guy was Hawkeye Pierce. It was odd to see him having what everybody is supposed to want. And he didn’t look unhappy. He just didn’t look how he used to look when Hawkeye thought he looked happy. But maybe none of that happiness really counted; after all, there was a war on. 

He lay for hours with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling of the Hunnicutt’s guest room. There was a relatively fresh coat of paint, but not fresh enough that you could smell it, meaning that Peggy had painted it some time while BJ was away and not, as Hawkeye had originally thought, just last week in his honor. He couldn’t believe he was in their house, in BJ’s house. After hearing fairytales about it for nearly two years he almost couldn’t believe it was a real place, and as teeming with life as it was. He fell into a fitful sleep sometime just before sunrise, and was woken a few hours later by the sound of a dog barking. He padded downstairs and found the curly haired pup pining at the front door.

“Morning, Waggles,” he said, leaning down to pet him behind his ears, before letting him outside and following him into the yard. He could see the layer of fog in the distance, but it was a sunny morning in Mill Valley. There were no sunny mornings in Crabapple Cove. Even on what would be a clear day, the mornings were chilly and cloudy, and only after your first cup of coffee would you really want to go and sit outside. But BJ was from California, where every morning was sunny. Hawkeye squinted blearily across the garden as Waggles did nothing less than frolic, and followed him back inside once he’d exhausted himself.

Hawkeye startled back inside the house, where he saw that Peggy had been watching him through the front door window, sipping from a mug, and wearing a pink bathrobe remarkably similar to Klinger’s. She looked better without any makeup on, even if she looked more exhausted. It reminded Hawkeye of being with Margaret after any number of grueling shifts, how being a good nurse and on occasion humanitarian made her more gorgeous to him than any cosmetics ever could. He became immediately self-conscious of the fact that he was only wearing a t-shirt and some flimsy flannel bottoms. He hadn’t even bothered to put on shoes. But she didn’t look disapproving; she was simply regarding him. He didn’t know if he liked being regarded very much. 

“Good morning,” she said, and smiled softly, sweetly. “Coffee?”

“Please,” Hawkeye said. He thought about taking a seat at one of the stools in front of the counter, but didn’t like the thought or the look of Peggy brewing coffee and serving him like a waitress. Instead he went around behind the counter like he had the day before, and sat on it with his toes grazing the floor. She handed him a mug and sat next to him, and clinked their cups before she drank again.

“To peace,” she toasted.

“And sunny mornings,” Hawkeye said.

“A Californian phenomenon,” Peg said. “I moved out here for school when I was seventeen and I never looked back.”

“BJ says you’re from Oklahoma?”

“That’s right.” Peggy breathed and looked out her kitchen window over the back garden. “I liked the country. Wide open spaces. But I didn’t like the attitude. Everything so traditional. Nothing for a woman to do. I didn’t like getting told I was crazy for having any aspirations at all,” she said, like she didn’t live the most traditional life Hawkeye could imagine.

“I missed my town, a lot,” Hawkeye said. “My mom used to work at the local library, before I was born.”

Peggy looked up at him. Perched on the counter, she was still short. He watched her eyes go from meeting his, to tracing his hairline, seemingly picking out every errant gray strand. And there were a lot more of those than he cared to mention.

“You know,” she said, “Every single person I know on Earth calls me ‘Peggy,’ except my mother. To her I’ll always be Margaret. Maggie, sometimes. Isn’t that strange?” Hawkeye wasn’t exactly sure what plane of reality this conversation was operating upon.

“I don’t know,” he said, “Nobody ever calls me ‘Margaret.’ Well, very rarely anyway. Frank would sleep talk.” He swallowed. “But my dad calls me Ben.”

“Oh, you don’t look like a Ben.”

“What do I look like?”

“I don’t know,” she said, studying his face. Graying hair, bleary blue eyes, stubble. “Hawkeye, I guess.”

He wanted to smile, but he couldn’t. “Nobody looks like a Hawkeye,” he said. 

“Maybe you’re the only one.”

He took that in for a second.

“BJ doesn’t call you Peggy. He calls you Peg.”

“He calls you Hawk.”

Peg, Peggy, Margaret, whatever, God, Hawkeye did not know how to talk to her. Besides, BJ was coming down the stairs with Erin in his arms anyway, and Hawkeye slinked away from his spot on the counter to make room or say hello or get away or something.

“Actually,” Hawkeye said, “Why don’t I make breakfast? I make a mean French toast. Do you like French toast?” He said to Erin as BJ sat her down on a stool behind the counter.

“Bagel,” Erin said. “Hawkeye. New York City!”

“Maybe another time!” Hawkeye said, while BJ and Peggy kept laughing. “For now…?” He asked, gesturing to the stove.

“By all means,” Peggy said, wrapping her robe around her and going to stand by BJ. He gave her a swift kiss on the temple and she folded herself into the crook of his arm.

“Sleep okay, Hawk?” BJ asked. Hawkeye shrugged and started going through their cabinets looking for cooking stuff.

“As well as I ever do,” he said, which wasn’t very well at all. 

BJ moved to tune the radio to listen to the weather report. A sunny day. Seventy degrees. In Maine you could maybe get a week’s worth of days like that in a year. It’s a charmed life in California.

“It’s a charmed life,” Peggy said when she maybe saw Hawkeye staring wistfully as the radio. He looked at her, startled.

“Uh, eggs?” Was all he could manage.

“Fridge?” BJ answered, looking confused, too. Peggy walked over to where he was and flipped the radio station when the news started.

And Hawkeye cooked while they listen to swing and Erin ate Hawkeye’s French toast which was really his dad’s French toast with her hands and got maple syrup all over the counter and BJ ate Hawkeye’s French toast which was really his dad’s French toast and said it was even better than he’d imagined and Peggy must have been there, too, but Hawkeye couldn’t see her because his vision was swimming. And Hawkeye ate half a slice and drank a second cup of coffee and all of a sudden he was showered and shaved and back in the Hunnicutt’s car except this time BJ was driving and he was riding shotgun (“God, don’t say that word!” BJ joked, allegedly) and Peg was in the back with Erin. Hawkeye watched BJ drum his fingers on the steering wheel while they trawled North Beach for parking spots. He wondered how long it would be before BJ wanted to operate again. He wondered how long it would be before he got a chance to ask him.

“Let’s go to City Lights first,” Peggy said, “I need to pick up some stuff for book club. Lunch at Angie’s after?” She asked to the group at large and to BJ in particular.

“What’s Angie’s?” Hawkeye asked.

“Ah, Angie’s. Angie’s is the best Chinese restaurant in San Francisco,” BJ said, as he led them around the corner and down a steeply sloping street. “It’s not really called Angie’s.”

“Naturally.”

“Naturally. But Angie runs it. Angie Chu. When we were kids her parents ran it. We were in Junior High together, and once a week we would go over there after school to do our homework together. We’d sit out back, they had this patio with a grill and a little picnic table, and her mom would bring us endless trays of food, the best you ever tasted, and juice made from fruit they didn’t sell at the grocery store. We never went together, but we did do one dance at our prom. She went to Berkeley. Good kid.”

“Anyway,” Peggy jumped in, “She runs it now, and not only is the food amazing, but we get a friends and family rate. And she doesn’t normally give discounts to vets.”

“She hates animals?” Hawkeye said.

“The army,” Peggy said, “almost as much as you do.”

“How would you know?” Hawkeye asked, not meaning it to be as much of a dig as it sounded.

“What do you think BJ wrote home about?”

Hawkeye felt himself go slightly red and hoped it looked like wind chafing.

They rounded another corner and BJ led them into the bookstore. Three stories of wall-to-wall everything, soft jazz playing in the background, the air was thick with cigarette smoke. It was really hip. Hawkeye felt about fifty years old describing it like that, but it was the only word for it. Every other person in there was wearing a black turtleneck, reminding him however painfully of Margaret, in a comparison about which if he told her he thought it would likely have been among the most insulting things he ever said to her.

“I’ll go pick up my things,” Peggy said, “Will you keep her away from anything too kid-unfriendly?”

BJ nodded and picked Erin up. He and Hawkeye ambled aimlessly among the stacks, drifting toward the first large wall of paperback novels. Alphabetical by author’s last name. _A…B…C…_ Without knowing he was doing it, Hawkeye found himself fingering the spine of a seemingly ancient _Last of the Mohicans_. BJ saw and titled his head sideways to read the title. He laughed.

“You’re so predictable,” BJ said.

“Am not.”

“I knew you were gonna say that.”

Hawkeye rapped him lightly with the book.

“I think I’ll get it, actually,” Hawkeye said.

“You don’t already have one?”

“I want to get it for Erin. Something to remember me by.”

Erin, who’d been staring interestedly over BJ’s shoulder, twisted around upon hearing her name and started listening.

“What are you talking about?” BJ said in a hushed tone almost like a stage whisper, “She won’t need anything to remember you by! She’s gonna be able to see you!”

“See me? What are you talking about?”

“See Hawkeye!” Erin interjected, and they both deflated a little. Hawkeye smiled.

“That’s right,” he said, “See Hawkeye. In fact,” he flicked through the pages of the book for a second, “you can see Hawkeye right there, see?” he pointed to the name in a dialogue tag, “Whenever you want.”

Her eyes followed his finger but didn’t really focus on the word. Still, she grinned when he said that.

“See Hawkeye!” She repeated, “Whenever!”

Hawkeye tried to meet BJ’s eyes over her shoulder but he was staring straight ahead at the stacks again. Hawkeye sighed. Maybe this was going to be a long week. And he hated himself for thinking that, but it was proving impossible so far to have a straight conversation with BJ, which was the whole reason he’d come out here in the first place. He trusted Sidney, sure, but BJ was the one who really knew him. He sure as hell didn’t trust himself. Which he then put in his mental ‘against’ column, about going back to work. Mostly the ‘for’ column consisted of the fact that he thought his brain was going to explode if he sat still any longer. Maybe he didn’t know how to work anymore without the pressure. Maybe he didn’t know how to work without BJ. Maybe he just didn’t know how to work anymore. But he wanted to give it a try. He just didn’t want to do it without understanding BJ first, and maybe not without BJ understanding him a little more, either.

Chinatown was only a short walk away, and there lied Angie’s. It slightly unnerved Hawkeye, watching how BJ interacted with his childhood friend. It looked like no time had passed between them, not like the vast cavern that had appeared between Hawkeye and all his old school friends. He didn’t feel like the war had changed him, but maybe it had made him more raw. He still believed the same things he always believed, and he still told the same jokes he always did, but he was uncompromising now, and small town life is all about compromising.

The three of them, Peg, BJ, and Angie, chatted and joked in a way that reminded Hawkeye achingly of him and BJ and Margaret. It looked effortless, laughing, a little ribbing here and there, and Hawkeye of course understood how BJ could feel this was where he belonged. Hawkeye just didn’t know what to do when the two places he belonged were on opposite sides of the country. And he still didn’t know what was so different about him and BJ that BJ could just fall back into his routines from before while everyone Hawkeye used to know just made him irritable. Still, Hawkeye was the one who wanted to back to work. That seemed to be the one part of civilian life BJ hadn’t readjusted to.

After lunch, which was as delicious and inexpensive as promised, BJ led them down to the marina to take Erin to the aquarium. Hawkeye had been to the aquarium in Bangor once, essentially one room with a glorified fish tank in it, on an underwhelming date in high school with the only girl who had a car. Obviously, the San Francisco aquarium was a whole other kettle of fish, but Hawkeye still couldn’t stop thinking about that date, about meeting Lisa’s eyes from across the exhibits as they watched eels and jellyfish swirl in mesmerizing patters in much the same way he and BJ were doing now. 

By the time Peggy had taken Erin home in the car and BJ and Hawkeye were staring across the ocean they were watching the sun set. If they got in the water and swam straight ahead they could be back in Uijeongbu in no time. They started speaking at the same time.

“I think we need to talk, BJ.”

“I said a lot of stuff to you when we were over there.”

“Oh no. No, no, no, you don’t give me the okay to fly three thousand miles to see you, to see my best friend, my real best friend, by the way, not some war buddy from the trenches just to tell me all that was in the heat of the moment, no fucking way, BJ Hunnicutt, that is not how this goes.”

“Hawk.”

“What? Jesus, what.”

“I did mean it. I did. It’s just,” he took a long breath, “You know the whole time I was there I felt like I was in two places at once. And it wasn’t even a fifty-fifty split. Most of me was back here, you know that. Well these days? These days it’s like most of me is someplace else! And I don’t know if it’s there or if it’s in Maine but either way it’s got to do with you. And I don’t know how I can live still feeling so split in half. Because it’s just like before.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t want to live without either of you, but…”

“But what, what?”

“But there are things I didn’t say to you because we were saying goodbye, and because it was so important to you that it went perfectly.”

“Right,” Hawkeye said, understanding and at the same time wishing he didn’t, because he remembered how well this conversation went the last time he’d hat it. He’d never been on the receiving end before. “You’ve got emotional baggage with my name on it,” Hawkeye said. “Better spill, or we’ll never get anywhere.”

BJ looked like he was steeling himself. Hawkeye tried to do that too without being so obvious, but inside all his muscles were clenched so tightly he thought he might split along the seams.

“Some people around camp were just waiting for the day you would finally snap,” BJ said, "but I wasn’t. So when you finally did? God, Hawk, I was so scared. Maybe it was my mistake, but I’d made you into my rock, you know? Sidney always said you were the sanest person there, and I agreed with him! You saw everything going on, and it made you angry, which is the only normal response. But you never understood how little any of us could do about it. I didn’t realize that of course, one day you’d be confronted with that. Finally feel as powerless as the rest of us. I didn’t know how to watch it break you like that.”

Fuck fuck fuck, this was just like Radar all over again.

“I didn’t ask for any of that,” Hawkeye said. “Yeah, I guess I’m just so fucking perfect and amazing that everybody has to look up to me and count on me all the time so I’m not allowed to fuck up like a normal person because then I’m ruining everybody else’s life and not just my own, huh! That doesn’t really seem like it’s my problem, BJ, that the people I think are closest to me don’t even seem to know I’m human. I don’t think that’s my goddamn fault, actually, since I think I make it pretty obvious all the time that I’m not perfect. It’s not my fault if you can’t… Jesus, Beej, it’s not my fucking fault.” Hawkeye gripped the railing over the pier to stop from shaking.

“Well, Jesus, Hawk, we know you’re not perfect! If you’d get out of your own ass for one second and actually listened to me you’d know that’s not what I’m saying.” BJ paused, and collected himself. “No, you’re not perfect. But you are good. And you’re right about a lot of things, a lot of really important things, actually. And it’s not my fault that you became important to me, since you do so many amazing things.”

No, Hawkeye thought, it wasn’t. And why was he doing all those things anyway if not to make himself important to BJ? Okay, that was only part of it. He’d have done most of that stuff anyway, if he was thinking of the same stuff as BJ. But he did it because he was trying to help. And trying to help almost always meant trying to help BJ most.

“When I got home, I didn’t laugh until I talked to you,” Hawkeye said. He watched the significance of that pass over BJ’s face. Hawkeye without laughter was like the desert without sand, the ocean without salt. “That’s how much I need you,” he went on, like that explained everything. Like that explained anything, which in a way, he knew it would.

BJ sighed and looked out over the pier. The sun was low on the horizon, casting a brilliant display in pinks and purples over the ocean view.

“Let’s not talk here,” BJ said. “I know somewhere we can go.”

He found a cab that would take them to the Haight, and walked for ten more minutes before leading them to a building Hawkeye hadn’t been to before, but recognized the type immediately.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Hawkeye said.

It wasn’t like Hawkeye had never come on to BJ. In fact, he’d done it plenty of times, usually when drunk, and more often than not got a little bit in return before BJ let him down gently again and things when back to normal. But even though he knew he stirred something in BJ, too, everybody knew (even if they didn’t say anything) that BJ was the straight one, and Hawkeye wasn’t (even if straight doesn’t really mean straight). So it seemed odd, bordering on cruel, that he would take him to a gay bar to let him down one more time, if that’s what was going on.

But, “Not to me,” BJ said. “Haven’t you been to a place like this before?”

“Well, yeah, sure I have,” Hawkeye answered. Of course he had. He’d spent his twenties in Harlem, and every other weekend in The Village. “Have you?”

“Sure,” BJ said. “I’ll try anything once.”

Hawkeye’s eyes traced the outline of BJ’s body as he led them through the door to two open seats at the bar. He knew everybody contained multitudes, but BJ seemed to more than others. Hawkeye didn’t know how someone could manage to be so clean-cut and scruffy at the same time. His life at home wasn’t just typical, it was stereotypical, but if you’d met him in Korea, with the perennial Chucks and the fatigues with the sleeves cut off, not to mention that ridiculous mustache, you never would have been able to guess how he lived here. That is, of course, until you talked to him for five minutes and discovered that his every other word was about Peg and Erin.

For a long while they just sat at the bar, in silence, waiting to get their order taken while Hawkeye licked the salt off two dozen pretzels. He peered around and became conscious of just how _straight_ they looked, compared to most of the guys in there. It’s not that the clothes were different– Hawkeye wasn’t the only person in there wearing a plaid shirt and jeans– but it was the way they fit him. His clothes hung off him like they were purely incidental, which by all accounts they were, being the first shirt and pants he could find in his bag that morning. BJ stuck out in a different way. Everything about his look was as carefully curated as his rebellious streak had been in Korea. The henley he dyed pink himself, his mustache trimmed or not depending on who he was trying to impress (or not), and the red suspenders just because Hawkeye liked the color were the same as the neatly pressed chinos and short sleeve button up he wore now. 

Hawkeye ordered a double bourbon, which was both what he’d asked for at the Officer’s Club the day he had a breakdown in O.R. and driven a jeep through it, and the grownup version of what BJ had ordered that first day at Kimpo. But mostly he couldn’t drink gin anymore. BJ got the same.

“Sometimes, at the supermarket,” BJ said suddenly, “I just stand and stare at the cases of grape soda.”

“They also serve who stand and stare,” Hawkeye said.

“For once, Hawkeye…” BJ said. The ‘ _could you take something seriously_ ’ was implied.BJ went on, “Talking to you, needing to talk to you, makes me worry I’m living in the past. I’m worried if I keep you in my life it’ll never go back to normal. I’ll never go back to normal.”

“But…” Hawkeye prompted.

“But,” BJ said, “I don’t want to live without you. What can I say, Hawk, I like you! You’re kind of a swell kind of guy!”

“Sure, now he tells me.”

“But what if you, me, this, is holding me back?” All along Hawkeye should have known it would come to this, that he would need BJ more than he needed him. But he didn’t say anything; he just let BJ talk.

“I keep thinking about that first day, my first day. Fifteen seconds after I met you I was sure I was screwed. I mean, you shook my hand but you didn’t even look at me. You were just talking to Radar about this whole other thing and it was like I wasn’t even there. Fifteen more seconds later? And it was like I was saved. You were just like a person. Like the only real person I’d talked to in six weeks. Making jokes, quoting Kipling, sneaking Radar into the Officers’ Club– using _my_ bars to sneak Radar into the Officers’ Club, stealing a jeep, a General’s jeep, right then I thought, if everybody over here is like this guy then maybe things are gonna be okay,” BJ paused, ran a hand over his face and through his hair.

“But nobody was like you, Hawk. And everything wasn’t okay. But anything that ever was okay? It was because of you. You felt like somebody I should know! Like I already knew you. Like you were somebody I should’ve known from before! But I didn’t know you before so now all you can ever mean to me is the war and I don’t know how to live with that because you should be more than that, I want you to be more than that but I don’t know that you are. I don’t know that you can be.” BJ was breathing hard and not looking at Hawkeye and Hawkeye was holding his breath and starting wide-eyed at BJ. 

“All I ever wanted was to get back home to Peg and Erin,” BJ went on, “I just want to go back to the way things were. I thought that’s what you wanted, too.”

“BJ, I don’t think there is any going back to the way things were. I think things are different now, and forward’s the only direction.” BJ looked at him, regarded him, like Peggy had.

Hawkeye didn’t mind being looked at. He liked being checked out. And he knew he made a spectacle of himself often enough that it was his own fault if people stared. But when BJ looked at him it was different. Anyone else just looked at him and saw what they wanted to see, a traitor, a hero, a scoundrel, a martyr, a comedian, a stupid kid, a doctor, a soldier. When BJ looked at him he really saw him. And he could never tell what he was thinking, which was the worst, since he was the only person whose opinion he really cared about.

“Why did you come here, Hawkeye?”

“I want to be a doctor again. Sidney said this would help me find out if I was ready.”

“And?”

“And…” Hawkeye repeated as he thought, and then spoke as the thoughts occurred to him, “I think I want do it. I just want to help, BJ, really, my whole life I’ve just been trying to help. And I know they sent us over there to ‘help’ but you know as well as I do that we did more harm than good, and I don’t just mean the army either, I mean, like, us, like, everyone we know, even if we didn’t mean to, and it was like I was undoing all the work I ever did in the whole rest of my life, and it made me feel so crazy, and not like a person, but I think I might be able to get it back if I go back to work like normal. And it’s not like I think I’m healthy again, like I’m 100%, I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever be 100%, but I can talk to Sidney, and maybe I’ll go to New York so I can see him, and it isn’t about guilt, either, like I don’t think I’m about to do penance by working myself raw in a hospital, I probably don’t even want to work emergency, really, because that’s probably nothing like a safe environment for me but… I loved being a doctor, Beej. It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do. Fuck, I’d be more worried if I didn’t want to go back–” and he might have kept talking but his words evaporated into mumbles because BJ had kissed him, there, at the bar, in front of everyone, which startled him for a second before he remembered that no one would care, and it had been so long since he was in a place like that that he became so exhilarated that it was like the first time they ever kissed all over again.

BJ was sweet, and Hawkeye was funny, and Hawkeye was bitter, and BJ was also funny. When BJ laughed for no reason in the middle of the kiss, it was the best thing Hawkeye had ever tasted. He passed his tongue over BJ’s teeth as they pulled apart and he saw that BJ was still smiling.

“How do you do that?” Hawkeye asked, trying to sound less out of breath than he was.

“What?”

“Keep the parts of your life so separate. I can’t do that. Everything just bleeds into everything else. I can’t keep up appearances. That’s why I never gave myself any appearances to keep up. I could never do this and still believe I never cheated on my wife.”

BJ sighed.

“I think I love you both,” BJ said, “That way.” It was both revelatory and somehow mundane, like it had always been a given. It also wasn’t the whole story.

“But you love her more.”

“No, not more, never more,” BJ said. “Just different. In a way I can fucking understand,” he said, and then he leaned in and kissed Hawkeye again, and he didn’t understand either, but for a second he was okay taking what he could get. They were just there, sitting at a bar, kissing, in a way that made the whole thing seem so almost normal that he let it go on longer than he meant to before he really realized that he was actually kissing BJ Hunnicutt, the world’s most committed husband and most self-destructive adulterer and pulled away.

“Stop, I can’t do this. I can’t compartmentalize like you can. And I can’t lie to Peggy. I would have thought you couldn’t either,” Hawkeye said.

“You’re right, I can’t lie to her. She knows.”

“And?”

“She wants me to stay.”

“Oh,” Hawkeye said. And he kind of felt like he understood everything at once. And he kind of respected Peggy for it. She could forgive her husband being in love with another man. She could probably forgive it even better after meeting Hawkeye and liking him, too. She just wanted him to stay because he was already hers. That was fair, fairer than most things Hawkeye had experienced in the last few years. It didn’t make him happy, but it didn’t make him angry either.

They stayed out late, far too late, like they always used to. The bus ride home was a lot longer that Hawkeye had realized, and either way they missed the last bus by at least an hour. So BJ walked them to the nearest hotel just outside the Castro because if they stayed on their feet any longer it looked like Hawkeye would collapse into an exhausted little puddle of sarcasm and longing.

BJ booked them a double room, of course, but they collapsed in the same bed. The first thing he did was call Peggy and tell her they were fine, they missed the last bus and were staying overnight, and they’d be back in the morning with brunch to make up for it. Peggy must have forgiven him awfully quickly if there was anything to forgive because the next thing BJ did was giggle childishly. A little more idle chatter and he wished her a good night and told her he loved her, and to tell Erin he loved her, and to tell Erin that she could have bagels with Hawkeye the next morning if she so desired. He laughed again at whatever she said and hung up, and flopped back down onto the bed next to Hawkeye, where he was propped up on one elbow like he was waiting to have a salacious portrait done.

“Let’s say you really want to go back to work, in a hospital,” BJ said.

“In a SCAPH.”

“Whatever. What if you found a job here?”

“Here? Where here?”

“Here! San Francisco! You could stay here as long as you want.”

“Beej…”

“No, it would be fine! Erin loves you, and Peg loves you, too. No matter what else, she loves you for keeping me alive. And your dad was nice to her at the reunion.”

“You think that’s enough?”

“You think love isn’t enough?”

“BJ, you’re not the only person I love. It’s not fair if you get to keep your family and I don’t. I can’t be that far from my dad again, from Crabapple. I know you always said it wasn’t the same and maybe it’s not but that doesn’t make it less.”

And BJ just looked at him again, and really saw him, again and again, like each time he looked he saw a new layer of truth to Hawkeye. BJ saw more layers in him than he ever thought he had.

“You’re right,” BJ said. Usually those words were magical, but coming from BJ they didn’t hold the same begrudging quality that gave Hawkeye’s ego it’s necessary sustenance. BJ was sincere in a way Hawkeye had never been able to be.

BJ extended his arm across the pillow next to him, inviting Hawkeye to rest his head there on his chest. He accepted, and shivered as BJ curled the arm around him and pulled him close. BJ laid a kiss on his forehead and he could feel as he breathed in and smelled his hair. It was just shampoo, the cheapest one from the drugstore in Crabapple, but he knew underneath there was the same layer of grime, of war, that he could never get rid of, and that no matter how many times he washed his hair, that’s all BJ would smell.

Hawkeye was about to fall asleep when BJ spoke again.

“Then why don’t I come with you?”

“What?”

“Not forever, just to send you off. Besides, it’s only fair that I get to come and see how you live after you’ve seen how I do.”

“Plane ticket,” Hawkeye mumbled into BJ’s shoulder, even as the thought of bringing him home to his dad excited him more than he cared to admit. “Expensive.”

“I’ll drive you,” BJ said, rubbing Hawkeye’s arm in a soothing gesture. “And wherever you wanna go next, I’ll take you there, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first of all, h&h bagels was the real deal, most delicious sourdough bagel ever and you could eat them without anything on them and then they went out of business and the owner got arrested for tax evasion or something?? And they reopened farther uptown but under new management and they do Not, repeat Not know how to slice lox. I figure this is something it’s ok to project about. 
> 
> Additionally I hold a grudge against “the writers” for insisting multiple times in only season 4 that hawk used to live/work in boston and then have this never come up (re: charles??) And have him know nothing about it when he’s pretending to be ted williams on the phone when all the time he behaves and acts so much like a new yorker that it’s viscerally painful they would suggest he acquired those habits elsewhere. Source? Me and Alan alda are both from new york and this is my fic so I say he went to Columbia and moves back to nyc after the war. Oh also that he lived in Harlem w a lesbian couple from Barnard and that’s that on that
> 
> Also also, if anyone wants to say hi… I’m @crickelwood on Tumblr :)
> 
> Up next: mill valley --> crabapple cove --> new york city !


	4. settle down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oy vey! okay, this one is long, and very dialogue heavy, but yknow, so is the tv show mash. besides, they have a lot to talk about :)

BJ spent the week fixing up the neighbors’ old beater, a station wagon that needed a little more than a new coat of paint, in exchange for borrowing it to drive Hawkeye home. It was a sunny morning when they were due to leave. Hawkeye had gotten off the phone with his father, whose smirk he could hear through the phone, and was doing one last sweep of the room. He considered leaving something behind on purpose so he would have an excuse to go see them again, but didn’t bother when instead he found the _Last of the Mohicans_ from that first day.

“ _See Hawkeye, whenever,_ ” he wrote in the inside cover, partially as explanation for his leaving the book and partially as an invocation, an invitation, and a prayer that they would come whenever, wherever he was. He stopped in Erin’s room and placed the book in her crib, then went downstairs with his things to say goodbye to her and Peggy.

When he saw him at the bottom of the stairs, Hawkeye had to admit BJ looked incredibly cool. He had on wire-rimmed sunglasses, with plastic in brown tortoiseshell for the tops of the frames, and he’d swapped his chinos for jeans and his loafers for a recognizable pair of sneakers.

“The Chucks are back?” Hawkeye said.

“Just trying them on for size.”

“They don’t make ‘em in your size.”

BJ rested his sunglasses on his head, and winked. Hawkeye swallowed.

“Peggy?” Hawkeye said, “I want to thank you for your hospitality. The last family I did this to kicked me out without so much as a bagel.”

“You’re welcome, Hawkeye,” she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. “Thanks for bringing him back,” she whispered in his ear, “just the way I left him. More or less.” She tucked some hair behind his ear before she went back over to BJ. She really was beautiful, especially first thing in the morning. He regretted not getting to know her better, but he’d been so wrapped up in trying to sort out this thing with BJ that she’d slipped through the cracks. And if BJ was complicated, boy, Hawkeye did not know what to expect from her. He let the two of them talk while he said goodbye to Erin, who was back at her perch on the counter.

“Well, kiddo, it was very good to meet you,” he said. She mirrored his grin.

“Good to meet Hawkeye!” she said.

“That’s right, if I do say so myself.”

She lifted her arms like she wanted to be picked up; Hawkeye obliged.

“I left a present for you upstairs, okay?” He said.

“Present!” She repeated. BJ and Peggy looked over.

“ _Mohicans_ ,” Hawkeye mouthed. BJ shook his head, but he was smiling.

“I’m illiterate,” Hawkeye said to Erin as she clutched his shoulders, “But BJ used to read to me every night.”

“That’s a very old joke,” BJ said.

“I’m a very old doctor.” Hawkeye bounced Erin and she giggled. “Your dad is a special person,” he said, too quietly for BJ to hear. “I’m very glad I had him in my life. I’m only sorry it had to be at your expense.” He kissed her on the forehead and mussed her hair, and Peggy motioned that she could take her.

BJ and Peggy said one last heartfelt goodbye, BJ kissed her and Erin, and then it was official. They were off.

The drive, like Hawkeye, seemed to exist only in extremes. The landscape was idyllic, the picture of serene Americana, and some days BJ and Hawkeye were so in synch it seemed like they could glide all the way to Crabapple Cove in one fell swoop. Some days, they had to pull off the road to let off steam. Not long after they left, they were driving through fields in Nevada.

“You know,” Hawkeye said, feeling combative, “sometimes I feel like I can play whole conversations with you over again in my head like they’re on a film reel.”

BJ resigned himself to whatever was coming. “What are you thinking about this time, Hawk?”

“Carrie. You remember Carrie, don’t you, Beej?”

“Hawk.”

“And Carlye, of course, because apparently I’ve lost the ability to think about you without thinking about her!”

BJ stopped the car. They were the only ones on the road.

“Hawkeye.”

“And you said all this stuff, about being married, that made it sound like the kind of person who would like to be married is so, so far divorced from the kind of person I could imagine myself being. You said you’d never been tempted to stray. Ever. And that you didn’t not cheat because you were worried about going to Hell or ruining the sanctity of your marriage, but just that you didn’t want to. And that you didn’t understand what you were doing because you were so madly in love with your wife. But when I see you with her you don’t look madly in love! But you know what? You looked madly in love with me! If you’d seen yourself you’d know. You looked madly in love with me and I don’t know where to put that when I see the life you’ve built for yourself that’s apparently the life you want and I don’t know if we’re speaking the same language about this stuff at all. Just, honestly, what do you think being madly in love is supposed to look like?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Hawkeye, how would you know? When have you ever been in love, really in love with anybody anyway? Yeah you _loved_ Carlye, but never enough to marry her. There’s nobody you love more than yourself, your ego, your jokes all the time, jokes jokes jokes. You’d be happy to be a bachelor forever if you could wake up every day and make people laugh in a hospital.”

He had to stop himself from saying _I’ve been in love with you, obviously_ , since apparently it wasn’t obvious to everyone.

“And so what if I would? Being a bachelor isn’t the same as being alone, you know. I’ve never been alone. You know I can’t stand it.”

“When are you going to grow up, Hawkeye? You know how the world works, don’t you? You get married, or you’re alone.”

“Ohhh,” Hawkeye said, “So that’s why you did it. You’re just like me, you know. You can’t stand to be alone, either. And you’ve convinced yourself that this is what you really want with your life, this cookie cutter version of domestic bliss, when what you really want is this!” He said, gesturing wildly.

“This! What this? You? You’re impossible to be in love with, Hawkeye! People will never be as important to you as things, or ideas, or whatever. Call them your principles, your moral code, whatever it is, the people in your life will always come second, including yourself. It is so hard to be in love with you, Hawk. I would know.”

Hawkeye needed to sit down, except he already was, so he got out of the car and started pacing. His whole life, having the same conversations over and over again, and why did he never change? Because he didn’t really want to, he supposed. He didn’t see what was so wrong about caring about things bigger than himself, about just trying to help, about always trying to be the good guy. It didn’t make sense how he could hurt people by trying to be a good doctor, and a good person, but it kept happening; it was happening still.

BJ sat in the car for a minute and let Hawkeye panic, but soon enough he got out and cut him off. He actually had to grab him by the arm to make him stop moving, but eventually he got him to look him in the eye.

“Look, Hawk, I guess it’s not your fault, but don’t act so naive.”

“I’m not naive. Your horizons are narrow.”

“My horizons? Hawkeye, you’re afraid of everything. When have you ever taken decisive action in your life? About something that would actually make a difference, I mean,” he said, cutting off Hawkeye’s interruption that he was constantly taking up pretty decisive action against any brass that crossed their path the whole time they were in Korea. “But yeah, sure,” BJ went on, “your options are wide open. But only because you’ve never taken a step in any direction.”

“Well _so-oo-rry,_ but it’s hard to find someone to settle down with when apparently I’m unloveable!”

“For God’s sake, you know that’s not what I said! Hawk, it’s easy to love you. Like falling off a log. Because you’re magnificent! You’re the funniest, the smartest, the bravest person I’ve ever met. You are the fucking tops. But you’re crazy, you know that? And you can’t be in love with someone who thinks he can save the world! It’s too hard knowing they’ll never love you the same as you love them. But me and Peg have that. We’ll always come first for each other, you know? It’s not your fault that you can’t live like that, but you can’t blame me for wanting it.”

“What kind of doctor are you if your work doesn’t come first? What kind of person are you if the world doesn’t come first?” Hawkeye asked. Any other time and BJ would have thought it was sarcasm but he may have been the only person wise enough to know the difference.

“What kind of husband are you if your wife doesn’t come first?” BJ answered, as best he could.

Hawkeye sighed. “I just want to be sure this is what you really want. Because… because if what you really want is this, is me, come with me. Come with me to Maine, move with me to New York! We could have a little apartment downtown and live how we wanted, we could do what we thought was right and not think about what anyone else has to say about it.”

“I know that’s how you live, Hawkeye. I really want you to be able to have that. And I want you in my life, I really do. But I can’t just throw away the life I’ve built with Peg. I don’t want to.” BJ breathed for a minute, and thought. “But I’m coming with you, now. And I’ll come with you to New York, if that’s what you want. And I’ll give you the biggest, grandest, most joyful send off you can imagine, nothing bittersweet about it. And no, we won’t just have dinner once a year, we’ll come and see you as often as we can, and you’ll get to watch Erin grow up just like we will. But just like you can’t leave your dad, your family, I can’t leave mine.”

“It’s not fair,” Hawkeye said, perfectly aware that he sounded like a petulant child.

“Who ever said it would be?” BJ said, and they got back in the car and kept driving.

A few days later, they were asked to leave a diner because their argument was disturbing the other customers. They barely registered as they were ushered out, and they fought loitering out front by a parking meter.

“Since day one,” Hawkeye said, “everything about you said ‘I’ll never leave without leaving a note.’ But you did it anyway. And I was so out of it from having a literal _nervous breakdown_ that I didn’t say anything, but… You gotta know that hurt, Beej.”

“I tried, Hawk, you know I tried. But there was too much to say. There was so much to say I don’t think I’ll ever be done saying it. Do you really think you wouldn’t have done the same if it was you?”

“I don’t know, BJ, but if you were in the _loony bin_ maybe I would’ve at least stopped to say goodbye!”

“I did! I already had my orders when I came to see you! And you didn’t let me say anything! Sidney told me to play it by ear. I didn’t know what it would do to you to hear me say I was going!”  
“I didn’t know what I was doing! You had no right to–”

“You said ‘tell me when you see me!’ You told me to wait! You basically told me to fuck off.”

“BJ, I was out of my skull! I was not of sound mind!”

“Are you ever?”

Hawkeye paused. He stared at BJ, trying to figure out if he knew he’d gone too far. Just like always, he couldn’t figure him at all.

“Fuck you, BJ,” he said. “Fuck you.”

Hawkeye sat down on the curb. BJ muttered something and paced up and down behind him. Eventually he sat down, too, his right knee bumping Hawkeye’s left.

“Shit, Hawk,” BJ said. “I’m sorry.”

Hawkeye was breathing shakily at his side.

“Everybody always thought I was crazy,” he said, “Everybody, at one point or another. Except you. That’s what I thought, anyway.”

“No, I didn’t– I never– _ugh_ ,” BJ all but growled. “I didn’t mean that. I just– you don’t know what it was like to see you in there. We went through a lot over there, you know? But nothing I saw was scarier than the look on your face after the wreck in the O-club.”

Hawkeye finally looked over at him. “I don’t even remember it. I still can’t remember it. I know it happened, but… it’s like it was to another person or something. The last thing I really remember is still the bus.”

Hawkeye felt like he was about to throw up. BJ put his arm around him and pulled him over until his head was resting on his shoulder. A couple passing by stared at them from the other side of the street but BJ didn’t see and Hawkeye didn’t care.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” Hawkeye said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Something must be. Or else why would I feel so guilty?”

One night in Nebraska they drove too long and couldn’t find a motel, and knew they would fall asleep before they found somewhere that could take them, so they put the seats down in the back and lay down side by side and imagined they were looking at the stars when they were just looking at the roof of BJ’s new old car. Hawkeye propped himself up to look out the back window and BJ nuzzled into the crook of his arm, eyes closed, seconds away from drifting off.

“Tell me again,” BJ mumbled, “about your parents.” Because one night in Tokyo when they weren’t sharing a room but BJ had collapsed on Hawkeye’s bed anyway, and they hadn’t known each other very long so BJ asked about his parents, since even drunk he knew Hawkeye wasn’t married. Since then he’d ask to hear the story every so often because he appeared to be driven slightly wild by the way Hawkeye talked about his family, the way it was totally different to how BJ talked about his.

Hawkeye sighed, and smiled, and ran his fingers through BJ’s hair, and started the story how he always did. It wasn’t really a story so much as it was his story, so of course, it started how it did.

“My dad is a doctor,” Hawkeye said, “If you can believe that. He’s also the funniest person I know. He’s the reason I’m funny, and not just funny like making jokes but silly, and not serious, even about serious things. My mother took him to New York with her to see the Marx Brothers on Broadway, so he knew to take me to the movies when they came out. He drove me all the way to the Paramount in Kennebunkport to see the _The Cocoanuts_ on opening night. He comes from Maine, like me.

“My mother was from New York, real New York, the Lower East Side, she always made sure to tell you. She didn’t want people thinking she was from the suburbs or something, since people from Long Island are always saying they’re from New York and hoping no one asks any questions. Mom spent her whole life before my dad there, and she used to love taking me anywhere even resembling a city. Even if it was just Bar Harbor. Once or twice we even made it into Boston. Because she also loved to travel. She told me how she was the only one of her friends who learned how to drive, and she saved up from years worth of shifts at the library to buy a car, and take herself on a road trip. She was driving due north, trying to get all the way into Canada, as far as she could go, but her car broke down in Crabapple Cove. And Dad was the first person she found, and he let her stay in his little apartment in town, above the old doctor’s office where he was working, and he was enough to make her leave the city forever.

“And my mom was just like my dad. He always knew the exact right thing to say, and she always knew the exact kinds of things you’d like. See, Dad never read much of anything besides the paper, but she always used to bring him books home from the library knowing how much he would love them. And she’d tell him, and he still never read anything. But one day, as legend has it, after one of her last shifts, since she was about to have a baby, she brought home a book, and she told him she’d bought it for him. And Mom never bought books, since she worked at the library. But she needed him to know just how perfect he would think it was, so she bought it for him. She was right, of course.”

“ _Last of the Mohicans_ ,” BJ had said that first night he heard the story, the story Hawkeye had heard a million times from his father, the story he loved the most because it proved just how perfect they both were. Tonight, BJ just leaned in closer to Hawkeye’s chest, so Hawkeye kept talking instead. There was more to the story, but BJ had heard it before.

“I think,” Hawkeye said, “I think you and Peggy remind me of them,” which made BJ stir.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… You know, I don’t actually remember my mother very well. But I remember what it felt like to be in the house with the two of them. A sense of calm. Even though I was totally off the walls as a kid–”

“No shit.”

Hawkeye smiled, “they made each other relaxed. You know, he doesn’t show it, but my dad’s been as tense as a watch spring for the last twenty-five years. She was his person, and suddenly she was gone.” Hawkeye traced patterns on BJ’s shoulder, only becoming marginally distracted by the feeling of those arms under his fingertips. “If that’s what you have with Peggy I can understand how you can’t leave.”

His parents had been perfect, but maybe they hadn’t been madly in love. Or maybe Hawkeye’s love just didn’t look the same as anyone else’s.

“I love her and she loves me,” BJ said, his eyes still closed, his breathing deepening as he melted into Hawkeye’s touch. “That’s been enough for us so far.”

 _And what about us?_ Hawkeye thought, _I love you and you love me, right?_ And besides, clearly it hadn’t been enough for them, for BJ and Peg. They’d had to get hitched, buy a house, get a mortgage, have a baby, get a second mortgage, get a dog for Pete’s sake. He and BJ had had nothing, nothing to keep them together except being forced to be there at all. But they were only tethered to the place that way; it was their choice to keep tethered to each other.

“I’m happy for you, BJ,” he said, but he wasn’t smiling. BJ was asleep, anyway. Hawkeye watched him, knowing how sad his own eyes must look, feeling how heavy lidded and red rimmed they were. He kissed the top of BJ’s head before turning around and curling up with his back him, and dreamt that he was blind, and trapped in a minefield, but BJ’s voice was guiding him out of it, but the instructions were wrong, and he took a misstep and awoke as the mine exploded beneath him. He screamed in real life, as in the dream.

They drove through Iowa almost without stopping. It was mostly nothing, of course, but every time they passed a farm Hawkeye’s heart lurched into his throat and BJ would place a steady hand on his thigh, and Hawkeye would focus on that until they passed the next farm and the panic set in all over again. And even though he didn’t mean to, he peered at every pasture looking for two kids in coke-bottle glasses until at some point they were in Indiana and their biggest concern was running into Frank.

“Run into him?” BJ said when Hawkeye brought it up. “We could run him over.” He patted the dash.

“Please, you know I hate violence.”

“Why didn’t you want to see him?” BJ asked, after he’d given Hawkeye a few more minutes to decompress.

“Frank? You want the reasons in alphabetical order or–”

“Obviously not Frank,” BJ said. “Radar.” 

“What are you talking about? Of course I wanted to see him. Of course I would’ve if I’d seen him. I mean, I wasn’t looking for him or anything, but if I had seen him, I would have liked to see him.” If he’d ever met him, BJ would have asked if Hawkeye was doing his Henry Blake impression.

“If you bring that sentence in for a fitting I can have it shortened for you by Wednesday,” BJ said instead.

“Pshh.”

“Besides, I saw you looking for him.”

“Did not.”

“Did, too.”

“Did not!”

“Hawkeye.” BJ glanced at him. The road was smooth enough to afford it. Hawkeye glanced back and calculated his next move.

“Did not.”

“Hawkeye!” Miscalculation.

“I’m sorry! I don’t know. I guess… I guess I’m worried I didn’t do right by him.”

“You did great by him. He loved you. He really looked up to you.”

“And what did I do to deserve that, huh?”

BJ sighed. It was becoming a common occurrence. “I don’t know how you manage to simultaneously have the biggest ego and the lowest self-esteem I’ve ever seen.”

“I’d say both are warranted. My screw ups are as magnificent as my successes.”

“Even if you hurt him sometimes, there’s no way that you did anything but help him grow. If you changed him, it was for the better.”

“How can you know that?”  
“Because that’s what you did for me, obviously.”

That shut him up for a while. 

Hawkeye distracted himself by watching BJ drive. Even though he took shifts sometimes, BJ hated the way he handled (and he wasn’t so fond of it himself), so BJ did most of the driving. He kept one hand on the wheel and the other out the window. While Hawkeye loved to sing along to the radio with oppressive volume and enthusiasm, BJ just bobbed his head with the beat, and smiled when he heard something he especially liked. Some days, in those sunglasses, he looked so much like a movie star that Hawkeye could hardly believe he was real, and halfway to being his. BJ always sat up straight, but looked relaxed and effortless, like keeping his head held high was second nature. He did have a certain golden-retriever quality to him, at least when Hawkeye managed to make him laugh out loud, but he also possessed a certain serenity, like he always knew what you were going to say before you said it, and he was just entertaining the idea of linear time for your benefit. He was as witty as Hawkeye, with half the effort, and maybe if Hawkeye were a jealous person he would’ve have found that annoying, but as it was he just found it almost unbearably sexy. It was usually enough trouble finding someone who could keep up with him. BJ didn’t just keep up, he led the way. 

He led them through Massachusetts, where they bypassed Boston by not hitting the coast until they’d crossed the border into New Hampshire. Hawkeye relaxed once he saw roads that he recognized, once they were careening through quaint New England towns that all kind of look the same yet are uniformly beautiful in their historical quality. The idea of living in a state that wasn’t established until the nineteenth century did slightly blow Hawkeye’s mind. Before they knew it, they were in Maine. Hawkeye could barely stop himself from grinning. It really was the most beautiful place on Earth.

Hawkeye lived just North of town, which meant they had to drive through Crabapple Cove proper on the way to the house. If it had been a real town, he would have pointed out historical landmarks and other places of note, but as it stood seemingly the only important thing that had ever happened there was Hawkeye’s childhood, so he pointed out all the places he’d ever had a formative moment while BJ hummed along in quiet acknowledgement. There was the library where he mother had worked, and the gazebo where he’d had his first kiss, the diner that made the second best corned beef hash in the northeast, and Hermitage Hill, the best and most treacherous sledding spot for miles.

The house looked old. Well, it didn’t just look old, it was old. And it might not have looked like much compared to the Hunnicutt’s suburban idyll, but it was home. Hawkeye fidgeted as he gave BJ the last few directions until they pulled into the driveway. There it was, his childhood home. Mostly brown, and wooden, with a few shingles in need of a repaint, but with stone inlay around the door and a well-loved wicker armchair on the porch. And there was BJ, looking so Californian, so completely incongruous with the quintessentially New England neighborhood.

“Well, here we are,” Hawkeye said.

“Here we are,” BJ agreed. He moved to leave the car but Hawkeye grabbed his hand and squeezed. He had the unmistakable anxiety of someone bringing his girlfriend home to meet his parents mixed with something entirely different that he couldn’t place.

“Thanks for coming,” Hawkeye said.

“Anytime.”

Hawkeye tried to tell if BJ was as nervous as he was, and tried to figure out just why he felt so nervous in the first place. BJ’s expression was calm, but slightly frowning, but maybe that was just for worrying about Hawkeye. Hawkeye frowned, too. Then he leaned over to the driver’s seat and kissed him, realizing as he did that it was the first time he’d done that while entirely sober. BJ kissed him back, and ran his free hand, the one that wasn’t still in Hawkeye’s grasp, along Hawk’s chest and toward the hem of his shirt. He started to lift it and feel underneath. Hawkeye breathed sharply, and grabbed his hand.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” BJ said, sounding embarrassed but not going red.

“No, no, no, believe me, I’m in. But we have to go meet my dad.”

“Mood killer,” BJ said on a smile and an exhale.

“Serially,” Hawkeye said. He smoothed his hair and checked his reflection in the rear view mirror.

When they went inside there was a note for them on the dining room table. Hawkeye glanced at it and laughed. BJ picked it up and read it aloud.

“Gone fishing. I’ll be back to make dinner. BJ, keep an eye on Ben. Watch him like a… never mind. Dad.” BJ laughed. ‘Ben’ sounded very odd coming out of BJ’s mouth. “Gone fishing?”

“Figure of speech. He could be wherever.” Hawkeye walked immediately to the fridge and started scavenging. “So, are you gonna?” He asked.

“What?” BJ said.

“Watch me like a…?”

“Hawk.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s very bad,” BJ said, grinning.

“Not funny, but fast!” Hawkeye said, all but leaping over the kitchen counter and out on to the porch, down some rickety wooden stairs and into the backyard. BJ ran after him like he’d agreed to play this impromptu game of tag and tackled him as gently as possible in the grass behind the house.

“How romantic,” BJ said while Hawkeye was still pinned underneath him, “Your dad set up a joke for us. That’s practically candles and rose petals.”

“Who’s a mood killer now?” Hawkeye said breathily, before he leaned up and kissed BJ again. This time, he wasn’t frowning. BJ laughed into it and kissed him back and felt so free he almost seemed like a different person. They were still like that when they heard a car start to pull up the street.

“Okay, play time’s over,” Hawkeye said, planting one last exhilarated kiss on BJ’s mouth before getting up and dusting himself off. He offered a hand to BJ to hoist himself up, and they sauntered back into the house giggling and looking suspicious in a way that might have had bad implications if they were anywhere else in the world, but for once, here, they felt safe.

Daniel was placing some large paper bags of groceries on the table when he saw them come in. He immediately pulled Hawkeye into a hug.

“Welcome back, kiddo,” he said warmly. He was shorter than Hawkeye, but thinner, and had the same silver hair he was surely destined for.

“Kiddo?” BJ said. Hawkeye laughed and mock shoved his dad away.

“This would be the eminent Dr. Hunnicutt?” Daniel said, “An honor and a privilege.” He hugged him as well, just as warm.

“It’s very good to meet you, Mr., uh, Dr. Pierce,” BJ said. Daniel laughed.

“Daniel,” he said. “I beg you. This is a first name basis kind of place, BJ.”

“So this is where you get it from?” BJ said to Hawkeye.

“I didn’t think it was a mystery.”

Hawkeye started unpacking the groceries while Daniel told them his plan for dinner. He also said he was going to stay out of their hair but that they were welcome to stay as long as they wanted. And that they didn’t have a guest room, but BJ could pick between the couches in the living room and the office.

“Or,” he said, “You can stay in Ben’s room.”

“And have Hawk sleep on the couch? He’ll wake up in the shape of a question mark,” BJ said.

“Whatever you say,” Daniel said, while avoiding Hawkeye’s eye contact. BJ put his things in Hawkeye’s room anyway.

“So tell me,” BJ said over dinner, once they were all a glass of wine deep, “What was Hawkeye like as a kid?”

Daniel smiled and looked over at his son.

“He was a troublemaker, pure and simple,” he said. BJ laughed.

“Was not!”

“Not on purpose, no. But the number of times I had to meet with the principal or come get you from detention? They tried to cut him some slack sometimes, but no one could handle him. ‘Your boy has some mouth on him,’ I got told who knows how many times. ‘And that ridiculous nickname does not help anything.’” Hawkeye rolled his eyes while BJ choked on his food from laughing.

Daniel shrugged. “Whatever I was doing here, they did _not_ approve. I didn’t care what they thought. They told me I shouldn’t be raising you to question authority.”

“You know,” Hawkeye interrupted, “I was getting in trouble for being a smart-aleck before I even knew what that meant. And the problem with getting in trouble for talking back is the more you ask what you’re doing wrong, the more trouble you get in, even if you’re being serious.”

“And all of a sudden you’re being court-martialed and you don’t even know why,” BJ finished.

“Right.” Hawkeye sighed. “I never really meant to end up like this.” He’d never been a bitter person before. A little rough around the edges maybe but that was only because he didn’t believe in pretense. But they made him into this, everyone from his elementary school principle to General MacArthur, they turned him from a curious kid, a bright, funny kid to a bitter old man who just got cut down and cut down again every time he questioned why things were the way they were, which was all the time.

Daniel asked if BJ wanted to call Peggy while he and Hawkeye cleaned up. He agreed that was probably a good idea. Daniel washed while Hawkeye dried.

“Peggy’s a good woman,” Daniel said, nodding in the direction of the hallway, BJ’s direction.

“Yeah, well, so am I.”

“You know, she told me she thought BJ might be in love with you.”

Hawkeye nearly dropped the plate he was holding. “What did you say to that?”

“I told her I was sorry.”

Hawkeye gripped the counter. “And?”

“She said she didn’t blame him, not really. She said you sounded… fun.”

“I am fun.”

“That’s what I said. I laughed. It was embarrassing.” Daniel smiled.

“Okay, and?”

“I told her for her sake I hoped it wasn’t true. But that for your sake? I couldn’t help but hope it was.”

“And? What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. But she figured it must mean you loved him, too.”

“Holy shit, Dad.”

“She’s a smart girl. I get what BJ sees in her.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I get what he sees in you, too, kiddo.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hawkeye said. He was looking down, but smiling. What do you do with an egomaniac who can’t take a compliment?

“Yeah, yeah,” Daniel repeated, grinning.

BJ reemerged in the dining room.

“All quiet on the western front?” Daniel said.

“I was gonna say that,” Hawkeye said, going over to BJ and leaving half the dishes sopping wet. “We’re going upstairs.”

“Thanks for dinner, Mr. Pierce!” BJ said as Hawkeye dragged him up the carpeted staircase, “I’ll be sure to have him home by midnight!” It was fun playing at being teenagers for a bit, the experience somewhat dampened and somewhat heightened by the fact that they were actually going to Hawkeye’s childhood bedroom.

“So this is where the magic happens,” BJ said when Hawkeye led them inside. He flicked on the lights.

“Shut up. I haven’t lived here since I was eighteen. I mean, not really.”

It was ridiculous, the sight of both of them all but crammed into Hawkeye’s twin sized bed. Hawkeye was already tall, but BJ was _tall_ , and he had actual shoulders, too, which apparently demanded all kinds of real estate. Still, despite all the other options, they remained there, curled together, watching the glow stars on Hawkeye’s ceiling in the shape of the Big Dipper as if they were going to see a shooting star. BJ said Hawkeye’s name in his sleep. He said ‘Margaret,’ too, and it was anybody’s guess who he meant.

They spent a week in the house while BJ spread out and grew comfortable, and Hawkeye got cabin fever. He made up his mind that it really was time to go back to the real world. At least now he didn’t need a distraction from the war, just from his wild wartime love affair, and diving into your work after a breakup is something normal, well-adjusted people do all the time. BJ could only give him goodbyes that weren’t goodbyes and breakups that weren’t breakups. Seemingly he had just as much a problem with commitment as Hawkeye did, just in the opposite direction. Hawkeye took him out on the lake one day, and rowed them out until they were alone.

“You’re always sneaking me out to secluded areas where no one could possibly see us. Are you embarrassed of me or something?” BJ said, clutching his chest in mock astonishment.

“Absolutely. I mean, look at yourself, you’re going bald.”

“You’re going gray.”

“So? Everyone loves a silver fox.”

“Tell that to Arlene Dixon.”

“Who?”   
“My high school geometry teacher. Her husband left her when she went gray.”

Hawkeye rolled his eyes. BJ smiled and batted his eyelashes, unashamedly stealing Hawkeye’s move. It made him laugh so hard he nearly lost his balance.

“Oh, who am I kidding, I can’t stay mad at you,” Hawkeye said, leaning over and pinching BJ’s cheek. He looked as if he was about to do something more but he just sat back down. “Besides, who could be angry on such a beautiful day.”

BJ nodded, tentatively. “Spring in the air.”

“Me, I should spring in the air and fall in the lake?” Now BJ rolled his eyes.

“You think you’re so funny.”

“Hey, don’t blame me, I stole that joke.”

BJ laughed, and sat back, and smiled. He was looking at Hawkeye like he was proud of him. What for, he couldn’t figure. All he knew was it made him feel warm in a way no look from anyone else could, and he forced himself to savor it, knowing that one day soon he would be saying goodbye again.

Any doctor worth his salt knows the second round in the O.R. is always worse than the first. When you go back into a wound before it’s had time to scar over, you’re just inviting an infection and more damage. He thought he’d scarred over from the last time BJ had broken his heart and said goodbye. That’s what he’d thought about Carlye, too. That’s why psychiatry is its own speciality, he figured. Flesh wounds heal different. Flesh wounds heal at all. 

Sidney helped him find a hospital, and a backup, in case the position fell through. BJ helped him find an apartment. And Dad helped him make breakfast when he was too fried to fry an egg. He hugged his father on the front porch as he received one last send off.

“I’m so proud of you, Ben,” he said. “I wish I could take all the credit, but I can’t. You’re a good person. And a great doctor.”

“What more could you want?”

He looked over Hawkeye’s shoulder at BJ getting into the car. “He’s a good one. I’m glad you found him.” _He doesn’t know what he would have done if I hadn’t found him_.

“Yeah, me, too.”

“God,” Daniel said, looking into Hawkeye’s eyes. Peggy was right, of course. Daniel’s were soft and hazel and Hannah’s were sharp and blue and Hawkeye’s were blue and dark at the same time so much so that they looked gray in the wrong light. “I wish your mom could see you now.”

“Wouldn’t that be something.”

“I love you, kiddo.”

“I love you, too, Dad.”

They sighed, and smiled, and Hawkeye reveled in the experience of saying goodbye of his own accord. He’d had said plenty of goodbyes in his life, but never one on his own terms. After he’d been drafted, he and his father hadn’t even had the chance to say it in person. He’d never get a chance like that with his mother again. He never got one with Trapper, or Carlye. But he was getting a chance with BJ.

“Hey, Hawk!” Daniel called after him, “Keep your feet off the dash, would you? That’s not your car.”

“Nice try, Dad,” Hawkeye said, grinning, as he got in and shut the passenger side door. It was incredible, everything Hawkeye needed in a few suitcases in the back of BJ’s car. As they left the driveway Hawkeye looked back to make sure his dad could see him sitting with his feet up. Daniel through them a mock salute, and Hawkeye waved back, and figured BJ thought he couldn’t see the tears in his eyes from behind his sunglasses. They didn’t talk until BJ had gotten them onto the highway.

“You never talk about your family, BJ. Ever.”

BJ stared straight ahead and drummed his fingers on the wheel.

“What are you talking about? I talk about Peg and Erin constantly. It’s my defining character trait.”

“I don’t mean them. I mean your parents. I think you told me once your dad was a doctor, too. You never even told me their real names. You’ve never even told me your real name, but I’ve learned my lesson about pressing that issue. And I think once you mentioned having a sister, but I honestly couldn’t tell if you were joking.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And you told me Peggy’s parents paid for your med school. But if your dad’s a doctor then they’re not broke, or if they died they definitely would’ve left you something. So I say again, you never talk about your family.”

“God, you really listen when I talk, huh.”

“Excruciating as it may be.”

“Yeah,” BJ said, and kept staring straight ahead, and kept drumming his fingers on the wheel.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it,” Hawkeye said. “I just want you to know that I noticed. And if you ever do wanna talk, that’s what I’m here for.”

“We’re not close,” BJ had said almost before Hawkeye had finished talking. “In case you couldn’t tell.”

Hawkeye watched his knuckles grow white as he gripped the wheel and fought the urge to cover BJ’s hand with his.

“And I do have a sister. A little sister. Ellie.”

“That’s funny,” Hawkeye said. “‘L. E.’”

“Right,” BJ said, and Hawkeye swore he saw the corners of his mouth flick upward. “Around the time me and Peg were gonna get married, Ellie had just started college in the city. In San Francisco I mean. And she told our parents that she wasn’t gonna move back home over the summer since she was moving to the city with her roommate. Who she was in love with.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Alice.”

“Oh. Uh-huh.” 

“They cut her off completely. No money for anything, they wouldn’t even take her phone calls. They told me what happened, and I called her, and she told me what happened, and I took her side, and they cut me off, too. That’s why me and Peg first moved in together. Or really I moved in with her.”

“Shit, BJ. I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.” Hawkeye knew it was because he was spoiled, but he really couldn’t fathom the idea of parents who wouldn’t love you unconditionally.

“It was a long time ago.”

“It’s still terrible.”

“Yeah, I know.” BJ sighed, again. The day had grown overcast, so he took off his sunglasses and rested them on the dash. “We don’t talk much,” he went on. “She’s okay, though. She has a good life. They live in Portland now, her and Alice. Oregon, not Maine, so don’t get excited. And she doesn’t know I’m…” He let Hawkeye finish that sentence however he wanted to in his head. As in, _she doesn’t know I’m turning down the opportunity to go live with my exceedingly handsome and clever lover Hawkeye in favor of maintaining the illusion that I’m a normal heterosexual man with a wife and a child and a house_. Who knows? Maybe Hawkeye was the one living in an illusion. He put on BJ’s sunglasses. He did find it interesting that the strength of a Hunnicutt commitment wasn’t limited to those made out of obligation. Ellie and Alice had been together almost as long as BJ and Peg. Longer than all of Hawkeye’s relationships combined. They rode most of the rest of the way in silence, except when Hawkeye had to yell when BJ almost missed their exit (“The Hutch! For God’s sake, get on the Hutch!”) and when the New York skyline first came into view.

“Holy cow,” BJ said out loud, though maybe he didn’t mean to. “Would you look at that.”

The apartment, when the finally found it (“How can you get lost here? It’s literally a grid!”) was a little dingy. Still, a run-down fourth floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen was palatial compared to where they’d spent the eternity in Korea, and Hawkeye reveled in the promise of having a room of his own. It was lightly furnished but significantly lacking a mattress. They spent the afternoon walking the streets of midtown to find a place to buy one and any other home furnishings than sprung to mind, and eventually did, carrying it the five blocks back between the two of them like a patient on a stretcher. 

“I hope this is worth it,” Hawkeye said.

“Anything beats sleeping on the floor.”

“Anything?”

“Well…” BJ said, “I hope so.”

It was worth it when they placed it by the radiator under the big window with a view of the whole city skyline and collapsed on it together to watch the Empire State Building lights go on.

“I was wrong before, you know,” BJ said while they ate pizza out of the box, sprawled across Hawkeye’s new mattress in just their undershirts and underwear. All their pajamas were buried deep in the bottoms of suitcases, was the excuse they would have given if pressed.

“It’s not impossible to be in love with you. How could it be? I do it every day,” BJ said. Hawkeye furrowed his brow. He didn’t know where this was going. “Life is just…” BJ went on, “It’s more complicated than I thought. Who would have thought you could really be in love with two people at once?”

“I don’t know,” Hawkeye said.

“Will that be enough for you? Just knowing I love you?”

“I guess it’ll have to be. I guess it’s better to know.”

“You must have already known. You said it yourself. I was madly in love with you. Mad with it. As mad as you.”

“You think I mean half the things I say?”

“Can’t you take this seriously?”

“You know the answer to that,” Hawkeye said, and tried to breathe with minimal finality. “Will I ever see you again?” He asked.

“Hawkeye, as often as I can will you see me. I don’t want to live without you. But neither of us can help it that we live three thousand miles apart. So we’ll come and see you. Don’t give me that look. For God’s sake, Peggy likes you! Erin likes you! Living in two places at once wasn’t nearly the worst thing about Korea. In fact, it saved my life.”

“I’ll write you every day,” Hawkeye said.

“I’ll write you back.”

“Stamps are so much cheaper than phone calls anyway. I was just praying you would stop calling me all the time.”

“Do not try to tell me you pay the phone bill in that house.”

“Not yet. But my dad is leaving me all his debt in his will.”

“Here,” BJ said, “Have something to remember me by.” When BJ kissed him Hawkeye vowed as a personal favor that he’d never forget how it felt.

After the sunset, they were staring out the window at the night sky like they were going to be able to see stars. Hawkeye was nestled into the crook of BJ’s arm thinking about how this was almost perfect. Thinking about how he’d had almost perfect so many times but could never seem to get it quite right, like maybe he wasn’t meant to.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to settle down,” Hawkeye said. He didn’t sound upset. He said it like it was a matter of fact. BJ answered with characteristic pragmatism.

“Sure you will, Hawk. One day you’ll find someone who wants to settle down with you, who you want to settle down with. We just met at the wrong time.”

“Yeah, Beej, the Korean War.”

“I mean since I already had Peg.”

“Yeah, I know,” Hawkeye said. “I mean I don’t think I can do it. Settling down doesn’t just mean settling down, you know? It means _settling down_.”

BJ looked at him. “I don’t follow.”

“I don’t mean that I couldn’t settle down _with_ someone. I mean that I can’t settle down at all. I can’t relax. I can’t take it easy. It’s like you said, I’ll always be like this. You’re right, I do care about things more than people. Not things like things, but things like, I don’t know, like you said. Justice. Peace. It sounds phony but I really do care about that stuff.”

“I know, Hawk. I know.”

“I don’t know, Beej. I think I care about people in general more than I could ever care about someone in particular. And I guess that’s not fair to the people I love, because I do love plenty of people, you especially. But I don’t think, I mean I genuinely don’t think I’m special, that I deserve special treatment, or something special from the universe. Like why should me and my friends be safe when everybody can’t be? I can’t… I can’t pretend like I care about the world less just because somebody who wants to marry me or whatever needs to always come first. Maybe it makes me a bad friend. I guess I’d rather be a bad friend than a bad person. Holy shit, BJ, that does make me sound insane.”

BJ raised his eyebrows. “A little weird, maybe, but not insane. What’s weird is that that’s why we love you. And so it hurts double because we knew what we were doing when we got into it.”

“All this makes it sound like I don’t really care about you or something. Part of the problem is I feel like I care about you more than anything. You. My dad,” Hawkeye looked down and crumpled slightly with each name, like every time he spoke he got another punch in the stomach. “Margaret. Even Charles. Klinger. Father Mulcahy. Colonel Potter. Radar! God, Radar!” He covered his eyes and tried half-heartedly to stem the tears.

“It’s okay, Hawk, it’s okay.” BJ pulled him into a hug and cradled his head in his hands. They fell asleep like that, with Hawkeye’s cheeks wet and buried into BJ’s chest. His last thought was to wonder if he’d ever had to hold Peggy like this.

BJ only stayed the one night. It wasn’t the elaborate send-off he’d perhaps envisioned, but since whatever it was, BJ gave it to him, it was perfect. They stood clutching each other on Hawkeye’s new front doorstep.

“You’re like a different person when you’re here,” Hawkeye said.

BJ looked down.

“Are you gonna be okay?” Hawkeye asked.

“I’m gonna have to,” BJ said, “like always.”

Hawkeye frowned. “Are you gonna go home and pretend like this didn’t happen?”

“Of course not,” BJ said, verging on genuinely offended. “I didn’t before. I won’t again. And I’ll be back. We’ll be back.”

“If you say so,” Hawkeye said, believing it and not believing it, and hoping it was true yet hating that their goodbye was turning wishy-washy again.

“Stop thinking of it as goodbye, for God’s sake,” BJ said, like he could read his mind. He always could. From day one. _Rudyard Kipling?_

“Okay,” Hawkeye finally said, “I won’t. But promise me you’ll see me again.”

“I promise, Hawk. I promise.”

And BJ pulled him into a hug, another last but not last embrace, as tight as he had the last time they said goodbye but not goodbye.

“I left you a note,” BJ murmured into Hawkeye’s neck.

“What?” Hawkeye said as they pulled apart. But BJ was leaving, dragging his hand along Hawkeye’s arm as he reached for the car door. And then he was in the car, and then he was driving away, and Hawkeye could picture him, sunglasses on, left hand out the window. He pretended he was watching the car get on the highway but he knew it had long since disappeared from view.

Upstairs there was a postcard lying on the mattress that hadn’t been there before. No, not a postcard, a photo, that someone had snapped while they weren’t looking, of them sitting outside the Swamp in deck chairs with their feet up, lounging as they dangled fishing rods into the tub they’d bought for the artificial kidney machine. He turned it over to see BJ’s note.

_Not goodbye. Just gone fishing._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> featuring jokes lifted directly from I’m sorry I’ll read that again (a 1960s-70s radio sketch show I highly recommend), the marx brothers, and this show called m.a.s.h which you may have heard of. also, I’ve said the second best corned beef hash comes from crabapple cove since the best comes from joe’s diner in lee, MA which will hopefully still be in business when I can go there next
> 
> And thanks for reading this far if you did! the target audience is basically only me, so if you enjoyed it that is an excellent bonus! and as I say, I’m working on a sequel to this of which this is really the prequel featuring Margaret and a time jump of a few years… who knows, perhaps this is not the end for don quixote and sancho xx
> 
> @crickelwood on tumblr if you want to say hi :)


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